Linux Magazine has a profile of Daniel Fore and the Elementary project. Elementary is a Linux distro that's committed to a clean and simple user experience, but it's more than a distro - it's actually a multi-pronged effort to make improvements to the user experience for a whole ecosystem of components, including icons, a GTK theme, Midori improvements, Nautilus, and even Firefox. The work that elementary is doing isn't limited to their own distro, and some of their work is available in current, and perhaps future, Ubuntu releases. The results are really striking, and I think it's probably the handsomest Linux UI I've ever seen.

What does Linux have to lose by moving away from the shared library system? Marketshare?

I'm really surprised by how many people are defending the status quo at this point.

Security is an issue too. If I maintain a GTK soft, I shouldn't have to care about GTK's security flaws and always keeping the GTK version which my soft provides up to date. Keeping my own soft secure is already too much time-consuming.